Eur. Phys. J. A (2008) 37: 217-225
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2008-10616-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Towards an understanding of heavy baryon spectroscopy

¹ Departamento de Física Fundamental, Universidad de Salamanca, E-37008, Salamanca, Spain
² Escuela Superior de Física y Matemáticas, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Edificio 9, 07738, México D.F., Mexico
³ Departamento de Física Teórica e IFIC, Universidad de Valencia-CSIC, E-46100 Burjassot, Valencia, Spain

^a valcarce@usal.es

Received: 18 June 2008
Published online: 17 July 2008

Abstract

The recent observation at CDF and D0 of Σ_b, Σ_b^* and Ξ_b baryons opens the door to the advent of new states in the bottom baryon sector. The states measured provide sufficient constraints to fix the parameters of phenomenological models. One may therefore consistently predict the full bottom baryon spectra. For this purpose we have solved exactly the three-quark problem by means of the Faddeev method in momentum space. We consider our guidance may help experimentalists in the search for new bottom baryons and their findings will help in constraining further the phenomenological models. We identify particular states whose masses may allow to discriminate between the dynamics for the light quark pairs predicted by different phenomenological models. Within the same framework we also present results for charmed, doubly charmed, and doubly bottom baryons. Our results provide a restricted possible assignment of quantum numbers to recently reported charmed-baryon states. Some of them are perfectly described by D-wave excitations with J^P = 5/2⁺, as the Λ_c(2880), Λ_c(3055), and Λ_c(3123).